Podcast Episodes
Back to Search“7 Vicious Vices of Rationalists” by Ben Pace
Vices aren't behaviors that one should never do. Rather, vices are behaviors that are fine and pleasurable to do in moderation, but tempting to do i…
10 months, 1 week ago
“Tell people as early as possible it’s not going to work out” by habryka
Context: Post #4 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption
This week's principle is more about how I wa…
10 months, 1 week ago
“Everyone has a plan until they get lied to the face” by Screwtape
"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."
- Mike Tyson
(The exact phrasing of that quote changes, this is my favourite.)
I think th…
10 months, 1 week ago
“Please, Don’t Roll Your Own Metaethics” by Wei Dai
One day, when I was an interning at the cryptography research department of a large software company, my boss handed me an assignment to break a pse…
10 months, 1 week ago
“Paranoia rules everything around me” by habryka
People sometimes make mistakes [citation needed].
The obvious explanation for most of those mistakes is that decision makers do not have access to t…
10 months, 1 week ago
“Human Values ≠ Goodness” by johnswentworth
There is a temptation to simply define Goodness as Human Values, or vice versa.
Alas, we do not get to choose the definitions of commonly used words…
10 months, 1 week ago
“Condensation” by abramdemski
Condensation: a theory of concepts is a model of concept-formation by Sam Eisenstat. Its goals and methods resemble John Wentworth's natural abstrac…
10 months, 2 weeks ago
“Mourning a life without AI” by Nikola Jurkovic
Recently, I looked at the one pair of winter boots I own, and I thought “I will probably never buy winter boots again.” The world as we know it prob…
10 months, 2 weeks ago
“Unexpected Things that are People” by Ben Goldhaber
Cross-posted from https://bengoldhaber.substack.com/
It's widely known that Corporations are People. This is universally agreed to be a good thing; …
10 months, 2 weeks ago
“Sonnet 4.5’s eval gaming seriously undermines alignment evals, and this seems caused by training on alignment evals” by Alexa Pan, ryan_greenblatt
According to the Sonnet 4.5 system card, Sonnet 4.5 is much more likely than Sonnet 4 to mention in its chain-of-thought that it thinks it is being e…
10 months, 2 weeks ago